Description:
In her keynote at ASEE last year, our president Dr. Sherra Kerns challenged us to imagine an age of the Citizen Engineer socially conscious engineers engaged in proactively tackling the enormous challenges that face the world today. How, through us, could ASEE become a critical player in solving the world's greatest challenges? For example, how could corporate partners advocate for funding needed for engineering education and research in ways that academia cannot? Where do we begin? Why? How? What do we know? What do we need to learn?

In our own membership are citizen engineers. Who are we? Several activist members who met at the last conference will share our answers to these questions. Charles Pezeshki will share his experience as an engineer activist for the environment, including his successful campaign to save forests in the Northwest. Lueny Morell will share her history as a professor at the University of Puerto Rico and now a director in University Relations for hp, with engaging the Puerto Rican government to proactively attract industry for research and development and to aggressively advance engineering education. She will conclude with recent successful efforts in engaging the government of Brazil as well as several Latin American intergovernmental agencies for the same ends. Isadore Davis will share his experiences with the city of Tucson, the State of Arizona and the U.S. government in economic and workforce development and industry/cluster partnerships in K-12 and higher education. Tom Roberts will share the curriculum for a legislative workshop developed for the KSPE (Kansas Society of Professional Engineers) on how to influence the state government on behalf of engineering and research, and some of the achievements of those who have been through this workshop. Im Barbara Waugh and I will share H-Ps University Relations and Government Affairs partnership-strategy for influencing state and federal engineering education and research. I will summarize lessons learned and questions outstanding from these presentations and explore with my co-presenters next steps for these and other citizen-engineers.